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Purpose Based on a relationship marketing approach, this paper aims to study the influence of social media use on salesperson performance and its underlying mechanisms from the perspective of salespeople in B2B settings. Design/methodology/approach To test the proposed model, the authors used structural equation modeling with a sample of 196 French B2B salespeople. Moreover, to explore the moderating effect of emotional management between social media use and relationship quality, the authors used the Hayes macro PROCESS for SPSS and the Johnson–Newman’s floodlight method. Findings The authors confirm the direct role of social media use on salesperson performance, and its indirect role through the parallel mediation of social proximity and relationship quality. The empirical study provides evidence for the moderating effect of emotional management on the relationship between social media use and relationship quality. Practical implications Companies should promote the use of social media to increase both the sales and creative performance of salespeople. Moreover, salespeople with low to moderate abilities to manage other people’s emotions benefit strongly from the use of social media, as this directly increases their relationship with their customers. Originality/value The research complements the conceptualization of salesperson performance as a combination of sales performance and sales creativity and shows that emotional management is an asset for social media users to develop valuable business relationships.

This article investigates the influence of the use of sales force automation (SFA) on the performance of business-to-business (B2B) salespersons, given its growing importance and much discussed effects. We examine the underlying mediating mechanisms between the use of SFA and salesperson outcomes (i.e. job satisfaction and salesperson performance). Based on a sample of 196 B2B salespeople, our results confirm the existence of a direct effect between the use of SFA and salespeople’s performance, as well as the existence of indirect effects via (1) interpersonal mediators, that is, successively adaptive selling behavior and relationship quality and (2) intrapersonal mediators, that is, successively role overload and the risk of salesperson burnout. The results also show the positive influence of job satisfaction on salespeople’s performance, and vice versa.